The amount of information available on the World Wide Web has grown exponentially, and billions of items (documents, images, videos, etc.) are available to a user through utilization of a browser. Such explosive growth of web information has not only created a crucial challenge for search engine companies in connection with handling large scale data, but has also increased the difficulty for a user to manage her information needs. For instance, it may be difficult for a user to compose a succinct and precise query to represent her information need.
Instead of pushing the burden of generating succinct search queries to users, search engines have been configured to provide increasingly relevant search results, given a particular query. More particularly, conventional search engines are configured to receive a query and to compare such query with a plurality of documents. Each query/document pair can be assigned a score, and the highest-scored document with respect to the query can be provided to the user in a graphical user interface as a most relevant search result with respect to the query.
While today's search engines are relatively robust with respect to ranking web documents with respect to a query, they are not configured to rank entities that belong to a certain domain. Entity ranking is difficult in general, because different domains usually have entities that are described by different attributes, to which weights need to be assigned when performing ranking. That is, entities in different domains have quite different attributes and the weights are dependent on the attributes when entity ranking is undertaken. Many heuristics exist to rank entities in a domain, such as, for instance, ranking singers or musicians based upon their popularity as evidenced by record sales. In another example, professors can be ranked by the number of publications authored by such professors and the quality of the venues where the publications appear. Such manners of ranking entities, however, are not robust, and less accurate as it is hard to incorporate numerous attributes heuristically.